The Seventh Tide Read online

  The sounds made the Queen smile.

  With a casual twist of her hand, the stuff she was holding began to spin and form itself into a funnel which she balanced on her palm – a perfect tiny copy had been spawned, identical to the huge vortex whirling above it. For a moment the Queen played about with it, leaning it this way and that and watching it right itself like a gyroscope, admiring her new toy.

  ‘We call it a Traveller,’ she said, still dallying with it.

  Then, as if by accident, she let it fall.

  As soon as it hit the ground the Traveller began to grow, until it was as tall as the Queen herself. She nodded, satisfied, and flicked her fingers at it. As the Traveller started to move, the three adult G found themselves frozen to the spot, unable to escape in any way. But the thing wasn’t interested in them. It was Eo it wanted. Closer it came, and closer, until the very edge of the Traveller touched him. Eo screamed in terror and the onlookers groaned, but even then it didn’t take him all at once. Instead he began to be drawn out, thinner and longer, as if he were paint dissolving in water that caught and swirled and dragged him in, dragged him round. Even his cries for help became thinner, like a distant wailing, and then he was gone.

  In the silence that followed they could hear the Queen chuckling to herself. She snapped her fingers and the Traveller returned to her, shrinking as it came, until it was as small as when she first formed it. She scooped it up from the sand and showed it to the remaining G. They clustered around, needing to look but sick at the thought of what they might see…

  A tiny Eo was trapped inside, whirled round and round, his face distorted with fear, his hands clawing at the invisible barrier, his body stretched impossibly backwards around the contour of the minute maelstrom. With a sudden jerk, the Kelpie Queen tipped the Traveller into Gladrag’s hands.

  ‘Your throw,’ she said.

  Gladrag yelped and almost dropped it.

  ‘Careful!’ warned Market Jones.

  Hibernation nodded, holding the thing gingerly now in her two hands, as if it might break. She couldn’t stop staring at it and the tiny terrified face that kept swirling past.

  Your throw!’ The Queen’s voice grated. ‘It’s TIME!’

  Market Jones leaned close to the Head of the G and whispered to her from behind his hand. Gladrag closed her eyes for a moment and then nodded. Interrupted Cadence was practically jigging up and down on the spot with anxiety.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he half-whispered, half-wailed. ‘How can we know when – where to throw it?!’

  ‘NOW!’ shrieked the Queen. ‘ The Tide is turning – can’t you tell?! NOW!’

  ‘Best guess,’ Gladrag muttered – and threw.

  The tiny vortex glinted in the morning sun as it arced from her hand and then fell towards the sand…

  … and disappeared.

  For a moment no one moved. Then the distant, indifferent cry of a gull broke the silence. The G stirred and looked at one another.

  ‘Is that it?’ croaked Interrupted. ‘Is there nothing more we can do? Do we just wait?’

  Gladrag had already started to nod when the Kelpie Queen laughed scornfully. ‘Why wait when watching’s half the fun?’ she shrilled. She reached into the main vortex, making it scream again as she dragged away a part. She smashed the piece flat between her long hands, then spun it out like pizza dough till it was about the size of an Extra Large.

  ‘A window on the worlds,’ she purred unpleasantly, and flipped the disc on to the beach, where it lay, shiny and vibrating slightly.

  The G looked from the Queen to the disc and back again.

  ‘Er,’ said Hibernation. ‘You’re staying? I mean, aren’t you going back in, er, there?’ She nodded at the Kelpie vortex.

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ the Queen sneered. ‘You’d like me to just leave you on your own, hatching up some cheat. Well, I don’t choose to do so. I think I’d rather just stay. Settle in a little, don’t you think – since it all, in a very few tides, will be mine…’

  She turned her back on them and studied the thing on the sand intently. The G took a step closer, trying to see over her shoulder, but she turned on them like an animal guarding a kill. ‘Mine!’ she snarled. ‘Mine!’

  They reared back, shocked by the look on her face.

  Then Market Jones reached for the encyclopedia. ‘What was it I read?’ he murmured, as if to himself. ‘It was under Unfair Advantage… Rules of Forfeit…’

  The Queen frowned, unable to remember any such section, but unwilling to call his bluff. For a long moment she hesitated, then, with a poor grace and no apparent care, she reached one more time into the body of the maelstrom and repeated the process. She flung the new disc up the beach, well away from hers, and turned her back on them again.

  The G rushed over, peered into the disc, and gasped.

  Inside the Traveller…

  It was temfying – a whirling boneless blackness. Eo couldn’t feel Hurpk round his neck. He couldn’t breathe. He should be drowning in the freezing dark but eternity passed and he was still alive, still aware…

  It was only when the Traveller finally spat him. out that unconsciousness, kindly, came.

  4 The First Tide

  ‘God forgive you – do you never pay attention?! A beast could write better than that!’

  ‘Gently, Brother. Maybe God meant him to be thick of head as well as thick of arm. He can row my boat for me even if he can’t get his wits round Holy Writ!’

  Adom felt his face flare red all over again.

  I’ll be hearing those words on my deathbed, he thought to himself. I’ll be old and grey and every morning I’ll wake up to the Holy Father jeering at me in my head.

  He didn’t notice the way anger was making him pull too hard, skewing the curragh off course.

  ‘ADOM!’

  ‘Pay attention, boy! Follow the boat in front, can’t you?’

  ‘He practically had us on the rocks there –’

  The brothers were all of a twitter, but the Holy Father hadn’t even looked up. If he were any other old man, Adom would have sworn he’d nodded off in the warm sun, but Columba was not like any other old man. He was Columba – the Holy Father, the stuff that saints are made of. Why should he care about Adom?

  And yet he’d brought Adom back from the edge of death, all those years ago. How could that not mean something?

  Adom was the youngest of a large family, a bit of a late surprise to his parents, but there had always been comings and goings between the farms of his older brothers and sisters, so he was never lonely. It was a life he knew well. He could so easily have just stayed a part of it all – if it hadn’t been for Columba.

  He’d heard the story a hundred times, of how ill he’d been, and how his family had given up hope.

  ‘Then we heard a holy man was come to the village to preach and heal, and we carried you there, as one last chance.

  ‘We laid you down on the ground, and the good man kneeled down beside you and prayed silently for a while. Then he made the sign of the cross on your forehead and was about to rise and move on – when you grabbed him! You grabbed hold of his hand with your two little ones and you held on to him like a dog with one bone. You didn’t say anything. You just held tight and stared.

  ‘We didn’t know what to do – we couldn’t loosen that grip for fear of hurting you! But the Holy Father only smiled, and said, “Let go of me now, little man. If it’s God’s will for you, when you are well once more and grown, I will take your hand again. Eh? How would that be? Sleep now, my son.”

  ‘You let go of him then, peaceful as could be. And when he marked your forehead with the sign of the cross a second time, you were already asleep.’

  ‘And I got better?’ Adom would prompt.

  ‘You did! Before the week was out, the fever had left you, and it wasn’t long after that you were up and about as if you’d never been so ill at all. Of course, the Holy Father left long before then, and with th
e world so big we may not ever have the blessing of his presence here again. But yours is a different story. He set you apart, that day.’

  It was a good story.

  But when, at age fifteen, he left behind everything he’d ever known and journeyed to the great man’s monastery on lona, it was as if the story had never happened. There was no special welcome, not even any kind of acknowledgement. The Columba who had saved him – he might have remembered Adom. But not this gaunt, silent old man.

  He barely saw the Holy Father that first summer, so caught up was Columba in his vigils and fasting and wrestling matches of prayer with God. Adom did see a lot of Brother Drostlin, though, the monk in charge of the boys and novices. And Adom was even less special to him.

  ‘Lazy. And stupid.’ That was his verdict on the new recruit. And the reason was simple: weedy youngsters half Adom’s age were learning in days and weeks what months of Brother Drostlin’s beatings failed to teach him.

  It had never occurred to Adom what the hardest part of his new life was going to be, because he had never had to deal with the written word before. You didn’t need to read to plough your scrap of land. You didn’t need to know how to write to catch enough fish to feed your family. Books and book learning were the province of the Church, part of its magic. But for Adom, it was a magic for which, it seemed, he had no aptitude. He could not make the letters speak to him. His hand was perfectly capable of everything else he’d ever put it to – but it could not control a quill.

  But I’m not lazy! Adom yelled inside his head. I’m not stupid! Why can’t I do this? I don’t understand!

  Some days it felt as if the world had become very small, crushingly small, no more than the square of table before him and the tormenting symbols that inhabited it. It may be that the summer felt that way for the Holy Father as well. Whatever the reason, one fine autumn morning, Columba burst into the scriptorium, where Brother Drostlin was, as usual, berating Adom for his laziness and inattention.

  ‘God forgive you –’ he was saying – ‘do you never pay attention?! A beast could write better than that!’

  And Columba’s voice, sounding positively jovial for the first time in months, broke in with, ‘Gently, Brother. Maybe God meant him to be thick of head as well as thick of arm. He can row my boat for me even if he can’t get his wits round Holy Writ!’

  Not fair! Not true! Adom cried out silently. The injustice of it was so enormous he was numb to everything else – the escape from the hated books, the excited bustle of preparations, the last-minute inspection of the curraghs and oars, all passed in a blur.

  And now he was on the water, on the way. Columba’s journeys to preach and heal were the stuff of legend, and here he was, a part of it all.

  A part. Set apart. Who believed that any more? He knew he was nothing. He was just a pair of strong arms…

  It was late in the day when the curragh finally turned towards shore. They pulled into an inlet, where a river flowed into the sea and there was a shingle beach to drag the boat out on. And, further back in the hills, the welcoming smoke of a settlement could be seen, hanging above the trees.

  ‘Where are we?’ Adom asked one of the brothers.

  ‘Don’t you know, boy?’ he said. ‘That’s the hall of the Bard up there, just beyond the village. Bard Devin. Surely you’ve heard of him?’

  Adom shook his head.

  ‘Don’t know much, do you? He came out from Ireland at the same time as Columba. They were friends in the old country, you know. They still are, only they don’t meet so much these days, of course. Oh, we’ll get a warm welcome in Devin’s hall, don’t you worry – and likely a tale or two as well! There he is now!’

  The figure approaching them from among the trees could not have been less like Adom’s idea of a bard. Devin was not an impressive sight. He was short and wiry and ordinary-looking, more like an underfed farmer than a poet and speaker of truths.

  The brothers were nervous about him, though.

  ‘How did he know we were coming?’ they whispered among themselves.

  ‘They say he has second sight.’

  ‘I heard the animals speak to him,’ another shrilled. ‘Birds, especially – they tell him what they see.’

  He’s a sorcerer?! thought Adom.

  It was hard to believe, especially when you saw him next to Columba, with his great height and his imposing beak of a nose and his charismatic, hooded eyes.

  Adom blinked. Had he just seen the little man slap the Holy Father on the back?!

  There was no time to wonder, though. Brother Drostlin found plenty of things for Adom to do, getting the curragh hauled up above the tide line and their gear to the Bard’s hall, and then helping to see that everyone was fed and cleaning up afterwards. It had been a long, hard day and Adom was dropping in his tracks by the end of it. All he wanted in the whole wide world was to lie down and go to sleep…

  … until Devin stood up.

  The moment the Bard opened his mouth all Adom’s tiredness was forgotten. Along with the others, he was immediately spellbound, frightened and inspired and soothed by turns, and laughing till he got side-ache at the ribald bits. The Bard could make his listeners feel anything he wished. Adom saw to his astonishment that even Columba went where the stories took him!

  When the tale-telling was over, Adom’s head was whirling. And then, as the company lay down to sleep, one more astounding thing happened. Adom and the brothers clustered close to the fire but Columba set himself further off, away from the comforting warmth, with his head on his pillow of stone and only the thinnest of cloaks over him. When Devin saw this, he tutted audibly, marched over and, without a by-your-leave, tucked a warm woollen blanket around the saint.

  And if that wasn’t amazing enough, Columba let him!

  Next morning, Brother Drostlin woke up cross. He didn’t like Columba suddenly going off on ‘adventures’ again, and he didn’t like being forced to rub his sanctified shoulders with peasants, and he didn’t like change. These were not feelings he was going to share with the Holy Father, of course, but that was no reason he shouldn’t pass on his discomfort to someone else…

  Which was why Adom found himself trudging back down to the shore. He’d been in trouble from practically first light. By mid-morning he’d acquired a cuffed ear and a stinking bucket of ox tallow, with orders to reseal the seams of the curraghs ‘for the safety of the Holy Father’. Adom had no desire to be responsible for the drowning of a future saint, or of himself for that matter, but the picture of Brother Drostlin going down for the third time had a certain appeal.

  Adom sighed pitiably (which is hard to do when you’re trying your best not to actually breathe), turned, tripped on a stone and almost glopped tallow all down his front.

  Idiot! he chided himself, since Brother Drostlin wasn’t there to do it for him.

  He made the rest of the journey with due care and attention, not stopping till he reached the edge of the trees. Here he paused for a moment and looked out over the bay. The curraghs were still safely there, long upside-down humps on the pebbles. The tide was well out –probably on the turn – revealing an expanse of mud and seaweed-encrusted rocks, with the river snaking through in its own little gully. The sky was clear and there was a brisk wind from the water.

  That’ll help with the stink, thought Adom approvingly, and he was just about to start off again when he saw something else. Partway between the curraghs and the river there was a wet, dark shape. It didn’t look right for a rock or a tree stump. A seal? wondered Adom. A beached baby whale? Meat?!

  He was already running forward, the bucket forgotten and a hefty stone in one hand. The pebbles crunching under his sandals were too loud! And then he was slipping and splashing across the muddy stretch, the rock raised, ready. In his mind he’d already killed the beast, whatever it was, he was the hero of the day, there’d be another feast, and more stories, and…

  Oh no, it’s heard me! It’s moving! It’ll get away!

 
; He slithered to a stop. There would be no feast tonight. His prize groaned and lifted its head – it was a waterlogged boy.

  The stone dropped from Adom’s fingers and he ran forward.

  ‘Heaven save us – are you all right? I thought you were a seal – were you swept off a boat? Can you stand? Can you walk?’

  The stranger seemed to be about his age, or maybe a little younger. He was alive and his big eyes were just opening, but at first he didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings. Then, all at once, he dragged in a sudden desperate breath and grabbed hold of Adom’s habit with both hands. A spasm shook his body.

  ‘Where is this?’ he croaked. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Easy, easy.’ Adom gently detached himself from the stranger’s grip. ‘You must have nearly drowned.’

  The boy looked at him with his over-large blue-grey eyes.

  ‘I should have,’ he said wonderingly ‘I really should have. I guess it’s not in the Rules for me to drown in the… what did she call it? The Traveller.’ He gave Adom a sudden blindingly cheerful grin and staggered to his feet. ‘My name’s Eo. What’s yours?’

  ‘Um, Adom,’ said Adom. ‘Here, you’ve got something tangled round your neck…’

  It looked pretty much like a hank of seaweed, but when Adom reached out a hand to unwind it, it sneezed. Adom leapt back and yelped, before realizing it was just some sort of wet weasel.

  It sneezed again, and then shook itself, splashing salt water into Adom’s face.

  ‘Hey!’ he spluttered.

  ‘Professor!’ cried the boy. ‘You’re all right!’

  The animal chittered rudely back and then tried to get inside the bag the boy had with him, until he opened it, and it flowed inside.